


The Absence of Fear

by BC_Brynn



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Nightmare Before Christmas Fusion, Case Fic, Communication, Developing Relationship, Dogs, Fluff and Angst, Forgiveness, Friendship, Love, M/M, Misunderstandings, Paternal!Aster, The Guardians are good bros, honeymoon phase
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-13 12:02:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21243761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BC_Brynn/pseuds/BC_Brynn
Summary: It takes Aster way too long, but eventually he notices that there’s something going on with Jackie.Suddenly he's up to his ears in a crisis, because they didn't think through what locking the Guardian of Fear away would mean for the children.They have to act fast if they want to avert the worst.





	The Absence of Fear

**Author's Note:**

> Hello new fandom!
> 
> Um… is there anyone still here, or am I too late?
> 
> So, so, I lowkey fell in love with the whole Guardians of Childhood thing when I saw the movie a few years back, and promptly dove into the nearest flaming dumpster to join the rest of the Jackrabbit trash. I know it’s been a long time, but this is actually the first RotG fic I’m posting. It’s based on the movie (with just bits and pieces of book canon sprinkled on top for kicks).
> 
> Also, fair warning, this is from Aster’s point of view. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but the story asked for it.
> 
> Happy Halloween, everyone!
> 
> (detailed warnings are in the end note)

Aster considered North a trusted and valued friend. He _did_. He was truly as fond of the drongo as you could be of someone who’s all about winter, gluttony and tack, and who when occasion called for it killed with prejudice anything that attacked your back.

“Fat, old, cheap _Ded Moroz_ imitation,” Aster grumbled, trudging along the main street of a small town. The late October evening had gone from chilly to cold, and the first stars above twinkled vindictively, promising at the very least hoarfrost tomorrow morning. Aster kept shivering. “El-Ahrairah’s frostbitten tail, Snowflake, where are ye?”

“Heads _up_. It’s like you don’t know me,” came from above.

No laugh. No laugh on a first frost evening? Bad sign.

Aster halted, suddenly twice as concerned. Jackie’s shadow lengthened as he stood up from his crouch on the telephone pole, but he didn’t hop down. Aster craned his neck, but the angle was bad, and he couldn’t gauge Jackie’s expression form the bare soles of his feet (cold feet, forever cold – they had a Compulsory Socks in the Nest Policy for a reason).

“I didn’t mean it,” said Aster, and although it sounded more like an accusation of Jackie getting all wound up for nothing, he actually _meant it_ as an apology.

He sucked at apologies.

Jackie sighed. “I know you didn’t.” His feet moved, step by step down the phone line, and Aster followed along beneath.

If Jackie wanted to get away from him, he would say so. Or he would jump on Wind and let her carry him into the darkness.

“Damn North,” Aster muttered under his breath. North would go on and on about his holiday, and dump on Easter, and usually that was fine, just ribbing between mates, but today Jackie was in a pensive mood, and that made Aster twitchy, and _that_ ended up with Aster letting rip at North about… he didn’t even know what. He just knew he said some pretty nasty remarks about the winter season.

Completely forgetting that North wasn’t the only winter spirit among them anymore.

And he didn’t mean it. ‘course he didn’t. He just automatically picked a recycled insult from the cache of diatribes he had used and reused over centuries of blues with North.

So now Jackie was here, _blue_ when he should have been all excited about finally getting to paint some real frost flowers. He should have been hopping line to line and roof to roof like a demented roo, dancing with Wind and turning the whole countryside into a health hazard. He should have been _laughing_.

“There she is,” Jackie whispered from above.

Aster tensed. What? Was Jackie on a hunt? Was there a monster hiding in the alley?

He took a gander ‘round the corner-

No monster. A little girl. A little girl with a school backpack – some kind of red and yellow robot on it, not a unicorn in sight – hiding behind a dumpster.

Jackie snuck along the edge of the roof, stepped off the eave and landed lightly on top of the dumpster. He flicked a big, cheerful snowflake at the tinlid.

Aster would have crossed his fingers if they bent that way-

No joy. Kid snorted like a pig and wiped her nose into the sleeve of her anorak. She didn’t notice Jackie at all.

Aster wanted nothing more than to hug his lonely sweetheart, but Jackie was so used to this, it didn’t bother him none. He just shrugged one shoulder and beckoned to Aster. “Your turn.”

Aster wished they didn’t have to have a routine for this exact situation. He _hoped_ one day, one day _soon_, this would stop happening. That they’d all see Jackie, that Jackie would be able to talk to them directly. Things were getting better, but the bar was set so low there you had to look for it in the cellar, and just _better_ was nowhere near _good enough_.

“Hey there, little one,” said Aster.

She turned to look at him. “I am _not_ seeing the Easter Bunny two days before Halloween. I’m _not_.”

“Ye are,” Aster assured her. Since when were they so sarcastic at this age? And why couldn’t North learn from them?

“Right.” She snorted again. “What are you? Jack Skellington wearing a lame Halloween costume?”

Aster puffed up with indignation – but deflated when he heard Jackie’s chuckle. He could take a bit of razzing if it got a laugh out of Jackie.

“I _am_ the Easter Bunny, and _ye_ are a right brave ankle-biter, but- Stop that!” Aster dodged when she poked at his ribs again. There was a line between brave and suicidal, and this was way beyond it.

“I’m not ankle-biter! I’m Katie!” She slung her backpack to her front and dug into it until she found a phone – one of the new sort with the touchscreen. She raised it toward Aster. “The guys are never gonna believe-”

Ice covered the little dot that must have been the phone’s camera.

Katie scowled. “What’s wrong with this- What did you do?!”

Aster had been contemplating the wisdom of trying to get the phone away from little Katie through sheer quickness. He was so fast he wouldn’t have hurt her, but he didn’t _like_ using fighting skills against a child, so he was glad that Jackie saved the situation.

Katie angrily shook the device and muttered several words that definitely didn’t belong in the mouth of a nice young girl.

Aster took a step closer and forced himself to relax, which, he had been reliably informed, looked intimidating from the outside. “Ye can’t go out alone at night, Katie-”

“Why?!” spat Katie, rubbing the phone against the leg of her jeans.

It let out a sad beep.

Aster glanced up at Jackie, perched at the edge of the dumpster. Jackie looked back, an unwarranted I-told-you-so expression on his face. He had, in fact, told Aster nothing. Aster had no earthly idea what they were doing here – what they were looking for.

He thought he had chased Jackie down to apologise for being a galah about the winter thing, not to do the neighbourhood watch’s job for them.

He turned back to the kid. “Someone could hurt ye-”

Katie rolled her eyes. “No one’s gonna hurt me.”

“There are a lot of bad people out there-”

“That’s just on TV. You can’t trust everything you see on TV, duh.”

“Anything could happen to ye. Ye could fall-”

“So? I’ll call home and Mom’ll come pick me up.” She twirled her cell phone in Aster’s direction. “Jeeze, there’s _nothing_ to be scared of! You’re just _a chicken_.” She rolled her eyes again, as if Aster was the one being silly (being _stupid_, actually, no one under the age of sixteen should be able to make such a derisive expression), turned on the heel of her sneaker – an unlaced one – and ran off down the darkened alley.

Aster moved to follow her, to try and convince her to go home, for El-Ahrairah’s sake (A tinlid like her out alone at night! He didn’t want to think of all that could happen to her!) – but a hand grabbed his bandolier and tugged to get him to stay.

Aster turned and glared up at Jackie.

But Jackie wasn’t looking at him to see the glare. He was clutching his staff in a white-knuckled grip and staring into the shadows with a scowl.

Jackie was all about fun, and mostly managed to wring some even from the darker moments of existence, so when he went icy quiet, like the dead calm just before a blizzard hit (one of the brutal ones that killed anything in their path) you knew things were proper down the dunny.

“…I think we screwed up,” said Jackie.

Aster hated that note of despair in his voice.

Jackie’s had too much rejection in his time, and not enough understanding or forgiveness. Even Aster himself had at first jumped to accusing him and cussing him out without listening to what happened. He tried to be better, do better – he’d bite off his own paw before he intentionally hurt Jackie – but the damage was done.

Whatever was going on here was not Jackie’s fault, but Aster had his work cut out for him to convince Jackie of that. “What did _we_ have to do with this… this… stupidity?”

Finally Jackie looked down to meet Aster’s eye. “We locked up Pitch.”

“What…?” Aster’s breath caught. “No.” They _had to_ lock up Pitch. Pitch was going to destroy _everything_. And what did Pitch have to do with Katie-girl running off into the night without a thought to her safety?

“Bun-Bun, what would happen if you…” Jackie’s face screwed up in pain. “…if something took you out?”

Aster was near-immortal, and absurdly old, and had been very lonely but mostly numb to it before Jackie turned up and turned Aster’s whole world upside down, poked at the crusted wounds until they started bleeding again. He had never thought twice about dying. Hadn’t cared much either way in eons.

He supposed the other Guardians would miss him for a bit, and there’d prolly be another Guardian picked. Someone would have to take over Easter, but as one of the main holidays there’d be no shortage of volunteers.

“No one to guard _hope_,” he guessed.

And Jackie – he didn’t want to think about that. Jackie had friends that would take care of him, but Aster wanted to never add to Jackie’s pain if he could at all help it. When Jackie wept, he cried little shards of ice instead of tears, and it just about broke Aster’s heart the one time he saw it happen.

“Hope would disappear?”

“Not… no, not disappear.” Aster searched for the right words. “Get scarce. There wouldn’t be enough for everybody. It happens places. Places I can’t go. Me and Morrigan have this love-hate relationship, and I can’t get a decent foothold anywhere there’s true hunger and…” He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to think about what kind of avatars gathered up the latent hope to make themselves way more powerful than they ever should have been. Warlords and dictators.

At least there were folk singers and poets. Aster liked folk singers. Poets were more hit and miss.

And Jackie had a point. Aster shook himself, trying to dislodge the faint dusting of dread he felt. He pressed his face into the front of Jackie’s hoodie, and that helped. So did Jackie’s arms around his head, holding lightly, offering what he could, still so unused to comfort and so racking self-conscious about giving it. It made Aster’s old heart ache something fierce.

“So there’s not enough fear because Pitch is locked up,” Jackie summarised over the top of Aster’s head, stroking one of Aster’s ears.

Aster didn’t manage to entirely suppress the next shiver.

Pitch couldn’t be allowed free. He ran roughshod. He had no limits. He raised the levels of terror and nightmares and exhaustion until the whole society turned upon itself. He was… he was an autoimmune disorder of the sentient species. He messed around for a few centuries, getting bloated, until he could come and finish the rotten dregs of what was once a beautiful, rich people.

He did it to the Pooka. Aster knew exactly what he was looking at that fateful Easter when Jackie became a Guardian. He knew what they averted, because he had seen it happen before.

“We can’t let him free.”

“I’m not saying we should,” Jackie said quickly. “But I think we can’t leave him in there either. There’s got to be a way keep fear healthy.”

Aster cursed himself for a fool. Millennia old, and still a damn drongo. Needed a young’un like his sweetheart to show him the way things were.

x

Aster was busy a lot of time – colours to discover, plants to grow, googs to paint – and so he didn’t always notice what was going on right under his nose. Sometimes it took him yonks to cotton onto things everybody else was already aware of.

That’s how it was with Jackie. Jackie turned up in such a whirlwind, and everything was helter-skelter for a while afterwards. Aster scrambled to catch up to whatever he missed, and suddenly it was a couple of years later. He paused to catch his breath, turned around – and discovered that his heart was missing.

Gave him a proper fright.

And Jackie, poor thing, didn’t get it when they took a stroll and a lunch in the Hitachi Seaside Park, or when Aster went sledding the Cascades with him even though his ears damn near froze off, or when North – damn him – sent them a joint invite for a Chrissy Party. Nah, Aster had to sit Jackie down on top of table in the Warren kitchen (that they’d shared for months already!), and tell him, _in words_, and even then it was like Jackie recognised the individual words, but they weren’t connecting in his head into full sentences.

Jackie followed along the ‘I love ye’ with just a little wobble, laughed off ‘I want us to belong together’ as a Guardian thing, misinterpreted ‘mate’ as Aussie slang for friend, and went full-on _lights on but nobody home_ when Aster ran out of patience and yelled ‘lovers, starlight, ye and I – and I want the nookie, too, if ye’re up for it’.

And now here Aster went again, missing it completely when Jackie noticed something was up, and when he went out into the world again and again to figure it out. He didn’t even have to ask why Jackie didn’t say anything – didn’t expect to be believed without proof. If he came to the Guardians with _just a feeling_, Tooth would try and argue simply because she wouldn’t want to face the truth of it, North wouldn’t even get _why_ the absence of fear was a bad thing, and Aster-

Aster couldn’t even guess how he’d have reacted if he hadn’t seen Katie the shrimp gallivant into the pitch-black without the slightest care. He _hoped_ he wouldn’t have made a horse’s arse of himself, but past experience spoke against him.

“I don’t want to fight Pitch again,” Aster said despondently as they piled into their kitchen. Hot tea first, he thought, reaching for the billy. He needed to warm up.

“I promise I won’t release Pitch if you let me out of your sight,” Jackie said with a grin, but there was more than a bit of seriousness in his voice.

Aster sighed. “Didn’t mean to make ye feel like I’m watching ye.” He didn’t think Jackie would – oh, nay, now that he was thinking about it, he _absolutely_ believed that Jackie would release Pitch if he thought it was the way out of this shemozzle. And then he’d prolly take off on his own, kicking himself outta the mob before they could do it to him, because he still expected punishment (_banishment_) instead of forgiveness and a chance to make up for whatever he did. “I’m ye Guardian, not ye guard.”

Jackie couldn’t blush, but the way he tucked his nose in the sleeve of his hoodie to hide his face came to the same thing.

It felt like a flower blooming inside Aster’s chest.

Jackie mumbled something about Aster embarrassing him, or maybe being embarrassing, but it all came down to Jackie losing his cool, and for a moment being unbearably cute.

Aster loved him like he’d forgotten he could love.

And not just when Jackie was being cute, even though that was one of the times it hit Aster’s gut especially hard. When Jackie was in danger, too, in battle, brutal and glorious and burning cold. When he licked out the minty center of the goog first and then ate the dark chocolate shell.

When they lay together at night, in the dark, and Jackie talked in bare words, matter-of-fact to the point of cruelty, about his past, about his death and about centuries of solitude and indifference and looking in from the outside. And in moments like these, when Jackie was being squirrelly, and Aster noticed far too late that there was something he should have been on top of for a while already.

“Show me what ye found out,” Aster asked just as the billy began to whistle. “And we’ll tell the rest of the gang together.”

x

Aster preferred the countryside – villages and small towns where most people knew each other, where you could yell over the fence and ask for a cup of sugar if you ran out in the middle of cooking. Where tinlids grew up running off to play in the woods instead of among concrete-and-steel constructs.

He always felt out of place in a city. So he wasn’t at all surprised that Jackie took them one.

They walked along a wide, grey street, cars whizzing past them. Even though it was after sunset, shops were open, lit up like insect catchers. People hurried every which way, some jumping into the traffic and setting off car horns, some impatiently waiting for the green lights at the crossings – some hurtling straight _through_ Aster and Jackie. Blind. The only beauty those nillwits saw and recognised was the canned kind or the kind stuffed full of preservatives.

It was always worst in the cities. Aster felt justified in his dislike of cities, in between the light pollution and ‘spring’ meaning dirty slush and overflowing drainage systems.

There was a sheila standing under the streetlight and smoking.

Aster frowned; she looked old enough to make up her own mind, but he still didn’t like it when kids smoked. Though, it was a bit hard to tell if she was a kid, what with the popping face paint and the long black coat. She should at least button up; the breeze was getting chillier with the falling night.

“Crap, sorry – am I late?” asked Jackie.

Aster turned to him, confused-

The sheila turned, too. She put out the ciggie against the lamppost and chucked it in the bin. “I’m early. Skipped the second half of the date.”

Jackie grimaced. “I can give him freeze-burn, if you want-”

“Not really a freeze-burn kind of offence. Just run-of-the-mill close-mindedness. You make a great spot-check for potential dating material, Frosty.” She stepped right up to Jackie and planted a kiss on his cheek. Then her eyes narrowed at where Aster was standing, like she was trying to see if there was anything there.

At her age she shouldn’t have noticed anything. She shouldn’t have seen Jackie, either.

Jackie sighed. His fingers tightened around Aster’s arm. “Soph.”

The sheila’s eyes narrowed even further, into a fearsome frown. Aster, far too late, realised that the look was focused – focused on him. She _could_ see him.

“It’s _Bunny_,” Jackie implored.

Her purple mouth twitched.

Aster cottoned on, _finally_. Oh, he was a right galah.

For Aster, time passed slow as molasses. He always forgot it went by in a flash for humans. He got the tinlids for four or five springs, and then they were too grown up and moved on to other dreams and other beliefs. Usually that was alright.

Usually Aster didn’t _know_ them. It was so much easier – so much less painful – to love them in abstract.

How long had it been? He had no idea. Since before he talked Jackie round, at least.

Handful of Easters. _Nothing_, to Aster.

She was so… so _grown up_.

“Hey, Sophie.” He had to remind himself not to stare. Last he had seen her, Sophie came up to his elbow, both her knees were scraped, and her hair was the colour of wheat. Now her hair was night-black with some purple in it – colour combination fit for an elegant but boring Easter egg – and in those shoes with two-inch soles she almost matched Jackie’s height. And for once Jackie wasn’t slouching.

“Bunny,” Sophie said in greeting. Her voice was tightly controlled. She didn’t even crack a smile. “Been a while.”

“I… uh…” Aster wished he had an excuse. “Busy,” he said lamely and cringed. He squashed the temptation to let the ground swallow him.

Sophie nodded, like she understood perfectly. She looked up over the rooftops, at the thundercloudy sky. “It’s about to get a lot worse.”

The streetlight overhead flickered ominously.

x

It seemed to Aster like it was a week ago when Sophie fit into the crook of his arm. Now she was a proper lady, and helping Jackie save the world.

“Last winter four kids froze to death in the suburbs. Another in the center. Two downtown. It was like an epidemy.” Sophie released Jackie’s elbow and sat in the rickety chair in front of the rickety desk. She booted up her computer. “The statistics are insane. Incidence on _everything_’s gone up. Murder, kidnapping, assault, accidents. Violent gun deaths. Drunk driving. Anything and everything up to and including suicides.”

Jackie and Aster sat down on the bed; the three of them barely fit into the tiny dormitory room, even with the roommate gone (the piggy left behind mess that made Aster’s fur rise).

“How did we not notice earlier?” wondered Jackie, echoing the question in Aster’s mind.

Aster knew how _he_ didn’t notice – he never noticed things until everyone else was already long since aware – but Tooth and Sandy should have been on top of this from the start. Or did they just ignore the sudden lack of nightmares and scary memories because it seemed like ‘a good thing’?

“It started from the adults. It’s only now that it’s spread to children, too.” Sophie pulled up a bunch of colourful graphs on the screen. All the numbers went up, at first slowly, then _doubling_ from year to year. She turned to glare at them. “You _need_ a Guardian of Fear.”

Jackie sighed. He put his hand on top of Aster’s paw and clasped it lightly. “We tried that – it landed us in that mess your brother pulled us out of.”

Sophie rolled her eyes. “Let me rephrase: you need a Guardian of Fear _that’s not power-mad_.”

Aster wasn’t sure that was possible. He couldn’t imagine himself ever slowing down on hoarding hope.

“It’s a compulsion,” Jackie explained. “We feel our aspect, and it feels good.”

That was too much an understatement.

“Addictive?” Sophie asked shrewdly.

“Yeah.”

Aster scowled. _Hope_ wasn’t _a drug_. “Now hold on just a moment-”

“Aster gets high on hope,” Jackie cut him off, squeezing his paw like a wordless apology. “I get high on fun. North – you get the idea.” Trust Jackie to put it in the barest, most unflattering terms. “And we subsist on it. Belief gives us power, but we need our aspect to survive.”

Aster hadn’t known _that_. It had never occurred to him to examine how his existence worked more closely than the simple ‘belief equals power equals life’. “Wait, how did ye find out all this?”

“I’ve managed to find resources in the past decade, Bun-Bun. I didn’t actually spend all that time riding around on Wind.”

Oh. Aster hadn’t known that, either. He felt hurt that Jackie hadn’t told him about it – but, then, he wasn’t entirely sure if Jackie _hadn’t_ actually mentioned it. Sometimes Aster went off in his head and didn’t pay much attention to the world around him. By now Jackie was good at telling when Aster wasn’t all-there – and pulling him back if his attention was needed – but back in the beginning…

Right. Maybe Jackie thought Aster didn’t care, or wasn’t interested in what was going on with him.

Aster would have to bring it up, talk it through with Jackie – but later. This wasn’t the time.

Jackie hopped to his feet and pressed a quick kiss to Aster’s forehead – asking for or offering forgiveness, that wasn’t entirely clear – and Aster curled his paws inward to prevent himself from grabbing. Not in front of an audience-

Sophie chuckled. “Yeah, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, Frosty. You two do look cute together.” Then she gave Aster a look that drilled right through him. “I read the _Hogfather_, Bunny. Sir Pratchett taught my generation how to kill an anthropomorphic personification-”

“Soph-”

“Shush, Frosty. Just ‘cause you’re both older than I’ll ever be doesn’t mean I don’t get to give him the shovel speech.”

Aster swallowed. He and Jackie had been together a while. Years, must have been – at least three Chrissy Parties, plus the one with the joint invitation before they were ‘official’. And they weren’t anything like rocky. Aster actually felt deadset confident about their relationship, for all that they were still learning how to make the other one happy. They were both plenty chewed up, so the going sometimes got a bit rough, but Jackie’s trust and affection was Aster’s greatest treasure.

That’s why Sophie’s doubt stabbed something sharp somewhere painful.

“I don’t…” Jackie rubbed his face. “Soph, _I_’m way more likely to- No, wait. You know what? That’s not the point. The point is that there’s kids dying out there, and we need to figure out how to _stop that_ before winter comes. That’s why I asked Aster to come along.”

“You trust him?” Sophie asked, giving Aster another suspicious look.

It hurt. He figured he probably deserved it from her for not showing his face for… however long it had actually been. He didn’t meant to abandon her. Time just… slipped away from him. And he was pretty sure teens didn’t go looking for Easter eggs, so she wouldn’t have seen hide, hair nor goog of Aster for a damn long time. But Jackie? Had Aster given Jackie a reason to doubt him?

“I trust him,” Jackie replied solemnly.

And that was just something in Aster’s eye. He was in no way leaking feelings.

“_Aspect_,” Sophie said, switching tracks back to the subject they were discussing before. “Go.”

“Right. _Fun_ for me, _hope_ for Aster. It feels good. We always want more of it-”

“But it self-regulates,” Sophie filled in, leaping brilliantly forwards while Aster struggled to merely keep up.

Jackie nodded. “Yeah. We try and foster as much of it as we can, and there’ll never be _too much_.”

“But with fear it’s easy to go overboard,” Sophie filled in, leaning back in her rickety chair and staring at the ceiling. “And it self-_propagates_. You’d need someone that could say ‘enough’.”

“Can’t be done,” Aster assured her.

Sophie scowled at him and opened her mouth to say something prolly cutting, but Jackie was faster. “Bun-Bun’s right. It can’t be done, Soph. And I’m not even saying they’d need _insane_ levels of self-control. I know spirits with insane self-control, and it’s just not enough. It _can’t_ be done.”

“Last time Pitch got out of control, the Guardians stopped him,” Sophie pointed out rationally. “That just means you’d need someone with a different aspect to cut them off. A partnership. Or mutual checks. Safeguards.”

Jackie folded his hands over the hook of his staff, head tilted in contemplation. “Pitch _was_ alone-”

“Not always,” Aster snapped. He didn’t want to talk about the Pooka. He didn’t even want to think about the Pooka. But if it helped prevent another genocide, he would. “He started out as one of our… _generals_, you’d say. He was a general, and he had colleagues, peers… friends. He betrayed them all.” Betrayed them to death _and worse_. “He corrupted them into the first Fearlings, and with that rotten army swept through our entire civilisation like a plague-”

“Fuck…” Sophie breathed.

Aster hadn’t wanted to do that. Hadn’t wanted to share the pain – not with a sheila that never should have been exposed to it (never should have had a reason to speak a word like that), and not even with Jackie. He wasn’t sure if it was selfishness or just the honest desire to keep Jackie separate from the agony of his past, safe from that kind of devastation.

Jackie squeezed Aster’s paw, shouldering part of the grief like a champ. And it was – good. It was good to have someone to lean on. New, but… good.

“It needs to be somehow self-_defeating_,” Sophie muttered. She yawned and rubbed at her eye; Aster was surprised her face-paint didn’t smear at all. “Like a valve. If there’s too much fear, it’ll start undermining the Guardian instead of nourishing them.” She made flapping and rotating motions with her hands, like she was trying to draw or mold an answer out of thin air. “Like overeating. Gorging yourself will make you sick. So we need something like that for the Guardian of Fear. Then they’ll maintain a healthy level-”

“Not to rain on your parade, Soph,” Jackie cut in, sounding dead tired, “but there are plenty of super-obese people out there who know it’s bad for them, and who don’t feel good, and who still overeat. We’re talking _compulsion_.”

Sophie made a nonverbal growling sound in her throat and flung her arms to the sides. “So there’s got to be two of them, who need each other to survive. A Guardian of Fear, and a Guardian of the opposite of fear. Courage? _Complacency_?”

“Hope?” Jackie retorted straightaway, like he didn’t even have to think about it. “Fun?”

Aster watched the two young’uns chew on the insides of their cheeks, and wished he had advice to offer about nurturing fear. But he only had experience in _fighting_ it.

x

Miss Sophie Bennet had a way of looking at a bloke that made him feel like she could see straight into his soul, and remained _unimpressed_ with what she saw there. With her pointedly holding onto Jackie’s elbow (nails painted purple clawing into the sleeve of Jackie’s hoodie) whenever she had a chance, it was clearer than day what she was unimpressed about.

Aster and Jackie being – well, Aster _and_ Jackie.

It made Aster want to tell her to mind her own business, but obviously Jackie _was_ her business, on account of them being friends – and Aster had missed that. How? He thought he and Jackie talked about everything important going on in their lives (and promptly cursed himself for a hypocrite, because he had barely mentioned the Pooka to Jackie, so where was he getting off?).

Still, this wasn’t old history, and it wasn’t painful to share. So why didn’t Jackie mention Sophie at all?

Was he still leery about showing too much of himself? Aster thought they had built up trust, but maybe they still had a way to go.

It always took Aster a fair bit of time and a kick in the tail.

Like when he first met Jackie for real. He started out prejudiced like a right dag, thinking that Jack Frost cared about nothing but his own fun. He had that drummed out of the lemon spread fast as a spooked hare, and by the time Jackie was an official _pledged_ Guardian, Aster knew Jackie would protect kids with the last strength in his soul, and that he’d go to war for his friends.

So Aster set out to be the kind of friend that deserved that kind of loyalty. He thought it’d be easy – it had been easy with North, who thought Aster grumping ‘round was mighty funny, and with Tooth, who understood viscerally what being the last of a warrior race was like, and even with Sandy, because Sandy was the closest Aster had to a peer on this beautiful green planet.

But. Jack Frost. Easy.

Yeah, right.

On horse’s Easter.

Turned out that fun-loving bloke, always laughing, always up for a spot of mischief? He was like the surface of lake, glittering in sunlight, with ripples running this way and that, hiding an unseen deep, deadly, cold trench below.

“Ah, strewth,” Aster muttered when the arctic chill hit him as soon as he climbed out of the Warren. No snow, at least, but he was already pitying his poor toes as he scrambled up the sloping meadow, frozen blades of grass creaking and breaking under his paws.

Jackie sat in the spot he liked best, on the very edge of the cliff, above the rock wall, face to face with the awe-inspiring expanse of the bush. It was anyone’s guess how much he could see of the vista, so deep in his own head. Nights like these were Jackie’s favourite. No Moon – Jackie still got bitter sometimes – but so many stars, and all so bright, you could see clear like it was the middle of the day.

A cold-arse day.

“You too, huh?” Jackie asked as Aster dumped a thick woolen blanket onto the ground and plopped down next to him.

“Nothing like a threat to the tinlids ye can’t properly whack to keep ye from getting a wink of sleep at night,” Aster replied, more to keep the thread going than because they needed to talk about it. Wasn’t any close to the first time sleep eluded one or both of them.

Usually they found constructive ways of spending the time, but once in a while the melancholia thickened too much, and it would have infected anything either of them tried to do. Jackie would likely as not unintentionally set off an avalanche somewhere on top of some lost hikers, and Aster didn’t like to think about it, but he knew where the ugly, garish googs came from.

Brooding was an age-honoured tradition in the Warren.

“We’ll figure it out,” Jackie promised. His heels kicked against the sheer cliffside a couple of times, and now he was watching the bush for real. It didn’t give him the same sense of peace as it gave Aster, because you couldn’t go against your aspect like that, but he still looked lifted up. Determined.

Aster didn’t doubt him for a second. He was a little less sure about himself, but he, too, had a track record to be proud of. “I’d just like it better if there was something to kick in the teeth.”

Jackie chuckled. “Yeah, I don’t doubt that. Prefer the easy ones myself.”

“_Easy ones_,” Aster mock-grumbled, setting off another chuckle.

They fell silent for a bit. Aster let Jackie be, wise by now to how best to handle his love. Jackie needed his space, and his time – sometimes he did better with a bit of reassurance, but not more than Aster had already provided. He had it down to art. A slapstick sketch, almost, with Aster playing the straight man and Jackie the one setting off all the laughs.

Took heaps of trial and failure to get here.

A couple of years of Jackie leaving when he felt blue – which was another thing Aster needed Sandy to tell him when he should have been the first to notice – followed by as much convincing as you ever had to do to get a skittish animal to stay close when it was in pain, and then the first time Jackie stayed in the Warren he iced over half a tunnel and Aster went berko. Made a right tit of himself.

Jackie, taking it to heart, started having nightmares and icing the nest in his sleep. Which was when Aster _finally_ got over himself and realised that it wasn’t anything like intentional, and just plain physical manifestation of Jackie being upset.

Aster tried to convince Jackie to stay, promised he wouldn’t throw another tanty, but Jackie causing unintentional harm whenever he got lost in his own head just added to his guilt and… well… here they were.

This worked.

Aster liked having Jackie close, _being close_, especially when Jackie was feeling in the dumps.

And Jackie liked the safety of knowing he wouldn’t unintentionally destroy anything out here on top of the hill.

“I still don’t wanna fight Pitch again,” said Aster. “But I will. If that’s what it takes – I will.” He was a lot of things (soldier, artist, explorer), but a philosopher wasn’t one of them. If there was some sort of cosmic balance to protect, he’d need someone to tell him exactly what to do.

Jackie swayed to the side, draped himself over Aster’s arm and buried his face in Aster’s shoulder. “Let’s shelve that as Plan Z.”

“Fancy Pitch becoming our Hail Mary, eh?” He leaned down and rubbed his chin on top of Jackie’s head.

The star-speckled sky twinkled.

Somewhere just beyond the line of horizon, the thirtieth of October tilted over into All Hallow’s Eve. The holiday of fear.

Tomorrow they would hunt down Skellington and get the good oil from him, and then take everything they had up to the North Pole.

Today’s visit to the North Pole would be just for observation.

But they weren’t feeling optimistic. Likely as not, Halloween too had become a time of fancy costumes and chocolate: not a fright in sight.

x

Aster was exactly right: fancy costumes everywhere he looked, and North had set up an actual chocolate fountain in the centre of the hall. It was practically an invitation for Aster to go there, spear one of the pieces of fruit on one of those colourful plastic sticks, dip it, eat it-

And show the party what a real Pooka soldier looked like.

North would probably think it was funny, and just set the Yeti on repairing the structural damage.

Tooth and Sandy knew to keep their distance, but at least they didn’t get bent out of shape about a bit of carnage.

Jackie – well, not like Jackie hadn’t seen it before. Aster wouldn’t… There’s just some things you don’t keep from the person you want to love you and trust you for a long damn time.

The rest of the guests would get a nasty shock, and probably spread a whole new bunch of rumours about the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog. Which reminded Aster again of the campaign Jackie had embarked on to get Aster to come to this shindig shifted into that murderous critter.

Aster wasn’t what anyone with half a brain would call sociable. He didn’t use to come to many of North’s hooplas. When he did come, he mostly lurked around the food tables and talked to spirits that shared some of his interests. Since Jackie barged into his life, he had let himself be pulled, grumbling and dragging his feet, into the thick of things. That, apparently, included the _spirit_ of the things: by which Jackie meant a costume.

Aster saved time and effort by shifting and calling it a day. It also racked off most other people, who thought it was cheating, so that was a nice bonus… He refused to go as _Caerbannog_, though.

“What are _you_ supposed to be?” drawled the Groundhog, turning his nose up at Jackie.

Jackie craned his head and looked down over the edge of his crate. He was floating three feet up from the floor – as was the crate – sprawled sideways in an indolent pose that kept giving Aster thoughts better suited for the privacy of the Warren.

“I’m Jack-in-a-box, of course,” said Jackie.

A huddle of seasonal spirits, who were avidly watching the confrontation, exploded in giggles.

Jackie braced the sole of his foot on the edge of the wood, half-seated, half lying in the crate once used for transporting cantaloupes.

The Groundhog snorted. Then his eyes moved to Aster. “I’m not even asking-”

“He’s the Velveteen Rabbit,” Jackie cut in, in the kind of voice he used when he was _spoiling_ for a fight. He was practically asking for it.

“Matching costumes.” The Groundhog sneered, disgusted, watching as Jackie reached out of the crate and gently tugged on the ear Aster had shifted to look like it was about to come off.

The spirits around just continued tittering.

Jackie’s grin widened. “Yeah, except mine’s tongue in cheek, whereas Bunny just _pulls it off_ phenomenally, don’t you think, _Phil_?”

Aster braced himself.

Groundhog was a dero, and Jackie had him exactly where he wanted him: one word in a mocking tone away from starting a brawl. On one paw, it was nice to see that Jackie had grown sure enough of his place among the Guardians that he didn’t hesitate to start a fight in the middle of one of North’s parties. On the other, Aster didn’t like what this said about Jackie’s state of mind.

If Jackie was so stressed that he wanted to punch it out… maybe they shouldn’t have come here tonight (and damn North’s whinging).

“You know,” Jackie said, grinning, “you could have just come wearing a tie and sunglasses. Or, wait, wait – you could have come wrapped in a blanket. Then you’d have been a pig-in-a-”

Well, Aster sighed to himself as the punching and shouting started, the only thing that was surprising about this turn of events was that it wasn’t _himself_ getting into it with the Groundhog. Usually that was the way it shook out. Maybe, it occurred to him, Jackie was doing this out of some misplaced sense of chivalry…

Aster didn’t think so. He moved out of the way, finished his glass of sparkling pumpkin juice – _delish_, North always had the best catering – and kept an eye out for anyone that might take the fisticuffs as an excuse to try and hurt someone for real.

No one did, fortunately. And barely anyone was even bothered. North’s parties did have a tendency to feature one or two punch-ups per occasion. He didn’t tolerate it at Chrissy, but other holidays were fair game. The big brute called _this _part ‘getting into spirit of things’ (and Aster honestly preferred the _spirit_ of jobbing a dag in the clock to the _spirit_ of dressing up as a damaged toy from a children’s book that once made him cry).

“Am thinking you lost something,” North announced, grinning, wading through the crowd toward the tables with the canapés (as Aster had noted, _excellent_ catering) where Aster had sought cover. He deposited Jackie in front of Aster like a naughty kitten.

Going by Jackie’s smug expression, this particular kitten had gotten both the cream and the canary, and blamed it all on the Groundhog.

“Was wondering where _that_ went,” Aster replied dryly.

North’s laughter boomed so loud it momentarily drowned out the music. “Am glad you’re having fun!” Then he leaned down and conspiratorially stage-whispered: “Am also glad Tooth is over there deep in the punch bowl.”

Aster nodded in fervent agreement. If Tooth had joined in the brawl, there would have been _blood_. Especially if she was already blotto.

North waded off again, shouting for Sandy.

“Feeling better now, ye hoon?” Aster asked, hovering between exasperation and delight. Like heck he needed Jackie to fight his battles for him – but that Jackie even tried was almost unbearably heart-warming.

Jackie showed off one single wall of the crate he managed to keep. “I’m Jack-out-of-the-box now. Broke the box over Punxsutawney’s head.”

Aster pulled Jackie closer to him and nuzzled his temple.

Jackie laughed. “What even- is this _actual_ velveteen?” He stroked the side of Aster’s face, fascinated with the unfamiliar sensation.

Aster’s default fur was like a wire brush. Coarse. Jackie never complained. He teased, sometimes, but he never, ever complained.

Maybe the _dressing up as a damaged toy from a children’s book_ part wasn’t _that_ bad, Aster mused, nuzzling into Jackie’s palm.

“If it’s worth doing…” Aster shut up, robbed of his breath when Jackie buried his face in Aster’s shoulder and then rubbed it in the – admittedly very soft – approximation of velveteen Aster was currently shifted into.

He gulped. His arms tightened around Jackie’s waist, pulling him closer, into Aster’s (at the moment oddly yielding) body.

“I think,” Jackie whispered, looking up with an unholy sparkle in his eyes, “that we should get out of here…”

Shifted shenanigans were actually par for course for Pooka, especially Pooka who got with someone of a different species – nothing for it, sometimes nature needed a bit of help to bridge the incompatibilities – but on Jackie’s side this sort of nookie counted as really kinky.

“…before we scandalize Nick’s other friends.”

Oh. Right. No way were they going to be doing any of this in public. That was just… manners. _Privacy_.

Aye, aye, aye, Aster _definitely_ remembered all that.

But, crikey, how his love distracted him.

x

They found Skellington on the morning after, sprawled inside the bottom half of a carved pumpkin the size of a bathtub. The ground around the orange monstrosity was strewn with empty bottles, and – right. Skellington was _bathing_ in booze. Aster morbidly wondered if he had bothered to pour the stuff through his skull for the principle of it, or if he decided to plain marinate his bones.

“Not that I don’t understand the impulse…” Jackie said with a hint of cutting humour.

Aster twitched. He, too, understood the impulse. All too well. All old soldiers tried that at one point or another. No better way of speeding up on the road of doing yourself in.

“_This is Halloween, everybody scream_…” Skellington sang drunkenly.

The ghost dog Zero mournfully howled the tune with him.

Jackie patted the dog’s head; then he leaned forward, rested his elbows on the fleshy, soft edge of the pumpkin half, and grimaced at the stink.

Skellington awkwardly shifted to face him; the ripple of booze he set off hit the pumpkin wall and splashed out through the toothy, grinning mouth carved into the side. He squinted – Aster chose not to think about how a skull could squint – and obviously recognised Jackie. After a while of racking his – metaphorical – brains, he said: “Boo.”

Jackie laughed.

The skull _pouted_. Aster was getting a headache just from thinking about what was happening in front of his own two eyes. Although the alcohol cloud wasn’t helping.

Skellington let out a little whimper. “N’thing… n’thing scares ‘em. N’thing.”

Zero howled in agreement.

“I’m a bit of a special case,” Jackie tried to reassure him, although most of his credibility was lost to his sniggering. “If _Pitch_ didn’t scare me-”

“_Jump-scares_!” Skellington cried. “I don’t do _fear_, my friend! Just startling them, and a bit of disgusted fascination with the gross – it’s _fun_!” He hiccoughed. “It’s s’posed to be fun…”

Jackie stopped laughing. He nodded. “I know. _I_ know.”

Skellington nodded back. “_You_ get it.”

Zero barked and came up to sniff at Aster’s ankles.

Aster tried to make his shuffle to Jackie’s other side look natural.

He knew that Jackie enjoyed the heck out of Halloween, especially whenever it was properly frosty. He could draw all sorts of weird critters onto windowpanes and nobody got bent out of shape over it. He sometimes helped Skellington with prep work. And the scare-awe-joy combination was one of his absolute favourites. Little made him as happy as seeing a tinlid go from shriek of fright to shriek of laughter in one breath.

And Skellington went to great lengths to make sure nobody got hurt. He had had one serious mess-up in the past, and learnt better. Aster respected a spirit that took pride in his professionalism.

And maybe he was a little jealous, sometimes, because he suspected that Halloween was Jackie’s _favourite_ holiday (no other time of year did kids shriek so much… except maybe mid-summer at the pool). Not that Jackie would ever own up to it.

The point was moot, though; right now Aster couldn’t have felt jealous if he tried.

“Not a lot of fun this year?” Jackie asked, but he really was just making a statement.

Skellington despondently shook his skull. “N’thing seems funny ‘bout it without the fright. They laugh at themselves for bein’ scared when they r’lise ‘s n’thing to be scared ‘f. No fright, no laughter.”

Aster still vividly remembered how it felt when Easter flopped. If he hadn’t been rearing up to fight Pitch, he prolly would have ended up just like this. “I know ye and Jackie collaborate-”

“_Jackie and Bunnie sitting in a tree_…” Skellington sang mockingly.

Aster ignored him. “But did ye use to work with Pitch, too?”

Skellington jackknifed into a sitting position, splattering booze everywhere around. Somehow he managed to convey baring his teeth despite the fact that his teeth were bared all the time. At the same time he debunked the notion that all skulls smiled all the time. This was not a smiling skull by any stretch of imagination. “Parasite!”

Zero started growling far more viciously than you’d expect from such a tiny woofa.

“That’s reassuring,” deadpanned Jackie.

Aster concurred. Sadly, it was the only reassuring thing about this entire field trip.

x

“Huh.”

Aster, distracted by the library computer in front of him, took maybe half a minute to respond. And even than he only managed a confused: “What?”

Jackie, who was leaning over his shoulder and watching the screen, just shrugged. “Nothing, nothing. Just – didn’t expect you to take to it so easily. What with you being a senior citizen-”

“Hah!” Aster twitched an ear, managing to bop Jackie on the nose with it by a happy accident. “Ye young’uns think ye invented tech. Well, let _me_ tell _ye_, this is nowhere near as advanced as the Pooka tech I worked with during the War.” Aster had been no expert – just a run-of-the-mill user, perhaps a little better than the civvies, but only for the additional training he received. Nothing to write home about. “The only special skill this computer requires is hitting the fiddly, tiny keyboard buttons.” He raised his paw. His fingers were far too wide – but he was used to delicate, detailed work on the googs, so this was hardly a challenge.

Jackie grinned. “They do make tech specially for senior citizens. Bigger buttons-”

He trailed off into laughter when Aster swiped at him and he had to dodge.

Aster found himself smiling despite the seriousness of the situation. He couldn’t muster a whole lot of cheer on his best days, but Jackie still brought _fun_ into his life the way he – Aster – _hoped_ he brought _hope_ into Jackie’s.

Or maybe he was just an old, infatuated fool. Could be that, too.

He grabbed Jackie’s wrist and nuzzled his palm – soft, cool, with its fiddly little fingers that fit onto the fiddly little keyboard keys.

Jackie chuckled, amused and subdued at the same time. “I’ll leave you to it. You know better what we’ll need to convince the gang…” He stepped backwards, still within Aster’s reach, but not comfortably so.

Aster threw him the first chocky he recovered from his bandolier; while Jackie munched on it, he turned back to the computer.

_Internet_, huh? The Pooka had had something similar, although Aster didn’t remember quite so much time-wasting and pointlessness. Self-expression for the sake of self-expression had not been quite as intrinsic to Pooka as it seemed to be to humans. Still, regardless of the form the final product took, Aster felt down to his bones that the Internet was humanity’s first step into their own Golden Age.

He shuddered to think of it. His claws clicked against the keys; he wielded the mouse with gentleness he usually reserved for the eggs. He tried not to interpret the numbers he was compiling for the report: deaths (accidental or malicious), injuries, losses. Pain everywhere – when pain was supposed to be the _second_ alarm that something was wrong.

There should have been the first alarm of _fear_.

“High latency,” Jackie whispered, going through Sophie’s notes for the third time.

Aster didn’t want to know how much higher the numbers should have been. This was another side-effect of the Pitch disaster. The numbness. The apathy.

Fear should work to support and highlight and uplift the positive emotions. Who would need _hope_ if there was no _fear_? Who would appreciate _wonder_ and _fun_ without ever knowing anything else? Even a pleasant tedium was a tedium.

_Memories_ would fade into grey without the emotional experience contained within.

Aster himself only remembered the most fraught (and a handful of the happiest) memories of his distant past. He knew the Empire had been great and bright and bountiful and full of amazing things and amazing people, but most of those were faded impressions, pictures of scenes – the Opal Square in front of the Lunanoff Palace filled with lines upon lines of soldiers, bright-coloured uniforms with golden braids and buttons glinting in the light of their star… the simultaneous lift-off of dozens of spacecrafts, the roar in his ears and the awed realisation that one day he was going to be on one of those ships himself… the sight of a lit-up, sparkling planet from orbit… the smell of the warren he had grown up in and the sound of his dam humming a familiar song.

It wasn’t much.

The War he remembered in high fidelity.

Aye. Aye, he could see it. They _needed_ fear to live – both in the sense of surviving, and in the sense of making life worth living.

But he was damned if they would be letting Pitch free after what he had done to the Pooka.

x

Aster had brought news of a threat to the North Pole before; each of the Guardians had, many times (leading to planning and action with varied levels of chaos and slapstick, although all their efforts ultimately ended in successes).

Each of them except Jackie.

This was Jackie’s first time standing in front of the rest of the mob and delivering a warning. He even refused to turn on the Aurora, saying it wasn’t that urgent, and that he could fly around and invite them all to this shinding personally.

Aster didn’t get it. Jackie could have – legitimately – lit up the Aurora, and he let the chance pass by? What a damn _waste_.

And if it was another of those ‘not a big deal’ things, Aster was going to read him the riot act (later, when the peanut gallery wasn’t there to comment) and stuff him so full of chocky he wouldn’t be able to move, much less prevent nice things from happening to him (also later, because Aster, contrary to popular belief, _could_ multitask).

Jackie twirled his staff around like a baton to redirect attention away from his nervous hopping (Aster couldn’t even flatter himself that it was imitation – it was just plain anxiety).

One of Tooth’s little fairies flew over to say hi.

“Hey, Baby Tooth,” Jackie crooned, and gave her a little tickle. She giggled.

“Oh, Jack!” Tooth exclaimed, following right on her sweet little minion’s wingtips. “Will you finally tell us what’s been bothering you?”

Sandy formed a foot tall but disconcertingly accurate statue of Pitch.

“Da, da!” North hooked his thumbs on his belt and stuck out his round stomach. “Jack is asking us all questions. How was Pitch imprisoned before – why are things different now? How different?”

Sandy’s sandy Pitch transformed into a question mark.

“None of us knows?” Tooth piped up, surprised.

North shook his head. “Was done before my time.”

Sandy reconstructed the Pitch statue and showed it falling asleep; then it fell apart into a hail of little question marks. He shrugged and spread his hands in a telling ‘no idea’ gesture.

Jackie nodded – obviously none of this was news to him. If he had wanted individual talks with the Guardians, that explained a little bit of why he refused to activate the Aurora (though Aster still wasn’t entirely convinced that was it). “Aster said that Pitch was imprisoned by the Man in the Moon before. And the Moon said nothing when I asked. I wish I could be surprised, but at this point it’s just business as usual.”

Tooth elbowed Sandy and buzzed: “He called him _Aster_!”

Right. Serious situation – serious Jackie. Usually the name was reserved for when they were alone, and Jackie called Aster ‘Bun-Bun’ or some even sillier variation in front of other people. And Aster was oblivious, but not so much that he would have missed all the bets taken on when he’d do his ‘nana at Jackie for it.

Like there was a damn thing wrong with Jackie thinly covering his expressions of affection with silliness.

“Manny leaves solution to us,” concluded North.

“And none of us have a racking clue what to do,” added Aster. He turned to Jackie. “Unless you came up with something?”

Jackie shuffled from foot to foot, and then took a deep breath. “So, I was thinking-”

Sandy dramatically widened his eyes, then grew sandy ‘icicles’ hanging from his chin and arms, and theatrically shuddered.

Aster glared at him. That wasn’t funny the first two times, and it wasn’t funny now either. Besides, if Jackie weren’t doing the thinking ‘round here, nobody would. If Jackie weren’t doing the thinking, they wouldn’t have even known anything was happening.

“-about what Aster told me about the first time Pitch’s power grew so much.”

Aster abandoned glaring at Sandy and turned his head to Jackie so fast his spine popped in two places. _What_ had he said that Jackie latched onto? Opening up about the War was harder than if he was a clam fossil, and Jackie never pushed, so Aster had probably mentioned all of ten sentences on the subject of his past over the entire course of their friendship. And he included the ‘chocky, additional limbs and berserk rage’ explanation in that count.

“And then, talking to Jack gave me an idea.”

Tooth fluttered over in panic. “Sweetheart, are you sick? Do you have a fever? Let me-”

Jackie fended her off as gently as he could. “Tooth, I’m _dead_. I don’t get sick.”

Tooth clasped her hands together, pulled her shoulders in and shuddered for real. “Don’t put it like that.”

Aster also didn’t like it when Jackie spoke of himself as a corpse, even though… technically… no, he wasn’t going to think about that. Spirit existence was more complicated than that.

On the other paw, Jackie had earned his _funereal_ humour and then some.

“No shame!” North exclaimed happily. “I speak to Nick, too. Look in mirror and give Nicky pep talk! Looking good, today, old chap! All that healthy blush in your cheeks!” He patted his face and then carded his fingers through his beard. “Have verrry good hair day!”

An awkward silence fell on the hall. North just clutched his belly, satisfied, and looked at Jackie with complete understanding, whereas Jackie seemed to be in terrible pain… as he struggled not to laugh.

Tooth covered her eyes with her hands; Aster could see her biting her lip.

Sandy appeared to split into two identical Sandies who put their arms around each other and smiled (one at Jackie, the other at North) in solidarity.

Aster was surrounded by idiots.

His love excepted.

“That’s nice, North,” Jackie said once he could speak without dissolving into a giggle fit. “Thanks for sharing that – that was… nice of you.”

“Very happy to help,” North assured him. Half a millennium in office, and still incapable of detecting sarcasm. An eternal baby – by his own admission.

Aster was begrudgingly fond of him, of course – you couldn’t not be after centuries of working and fighting together – but maybe this was why he had been so surprised by his almost immediate and _visceral_ friendship with Jackie. They fought like cats and dogs, but Aster was ready to open his Warren when Jackie needed a place to rest after fighting Pitch, and two days later he would have sooner parted with an ear than said a lasting goodbye to Jackie. It had been a very long time since there was anyone he could _talk to_ with any hope of being _understood_.

“Right…” Jackie cleared his throat and spun his staff between his fingers (another of his obvious nervous gestures). “So… talking to Jack _Skellington_ gave me an idea.”

“Oh,” said North.

Everyone else pretended not to notice.

“Jack pointed out the difference between _fear _and_ fright_.” Jackie paused to check on his audience – at least they were thinking about it, and not just pointlessly wringing their hands. “And I think we need to look a little closer at what it is we’re fighting.”

“Know thy enemy!” exclaimed North.

Aster flinched. He rubbed at his ears, trying to get the ringing to stop. Maybe it would halve the pain if he lost one – but, no, he could already hear all the _Podkin_ jokes.

“Yeah, that too. Fright is alright. Fright, if done right, can be fun-” Jackie grinned for an instance, and then grinned yet wider when he spotted Aster rolling his eyes, but a moment later he was serious again. “But we’ve sort of lumped all fear into one bag and called it _Pitch_. And that’s – that’s not _true_. He took advantage of terror and mass panic, and he managed to spread that from adults to children, which really isn’t hard, because children see a lot more than the adults think they do-”

“_Da_. Children are very clever.”

“Oh dear, you wouldn’t believe how many fakes they try to fob to me for a quarter. This one girl from Klagenfurt had a handful of _pig_ teeth under her pillow-”

“Can’t exactly stop that,” Aster grumbled over Tooth’s jabbering about teeth. “People being stupid. People are people. It’s what makes them… ye know. _People_.” He scratched at the back of his neck. Strewth, he could have phrased that better.

Although the crinkling around Jackie’s eyes was well worth the humiliation. And Tooth could stop snickering already and go back to the handwringing and the dental obsession, thanks ever so – why did Aster warrant the embarrassment when North didn’t? Was North really such a baby that nobody wanted to hurt his feelings, whereas dumping on cranky old Aster was perfectly funny?

Aster chucked a boomerang through the sandy picture of a thumping cartoon heart above Sandy’s head, and twitched his nose when it burst into a shower of tiny sandy snowflakes. “Shut yer gob.”

He pulled the boomerang out of the air on its way back and stashed it in his bandolier without even looking that way.

He was too busy enjoying the way Jackie got sidetracked for a minute watching Aster.

Jackie shamelessly rubbed his cheek against Aster’s biceps, before he stepped away and swung his staff over his shoulder. “The problem is civilization itself. Education. Informatization. Media.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Tooth.

“How fear spreads. Why it’s so cancerous.” Jackie looked around and took in the three pictures of utter incomprehension. “What Pitch did before – he hijacks mass media, that’s how he operates.”

Sandy formed, in fast succession: a lightbulb, a swastika, crossed hammer and sickle and then a pig waving a tiny flag.

Aster suspected that was far too literary a reference for anyone else to understand, but Jackie tended to surprise him. Close as he was with Sophie, maybe he went through all her school-assigned reading with her.

“You mean – separate the primitive fear,” Aster added, when neither North nor Tooth caught on. They had a different way of looking at the world, and Jackie wasn’t exactly great at explaining. His nerves didn’t help either.

“Yeah,” Jackie breathed, dancing over and leaning into Tooth’s and North’s personal space, all excited. “We don’t need a Guardian of Fear. We need a Guardian of _Instinctive_ Fear.”

Oh. And here Aster thought that he had managed to keep pace with Jackie. “That’s… brill.” He could see it – a far better solution than any of the ideas they had hashed out with Sophie, more elegant and, most importantly, potentially working. “You’re brill, Jackie-”

“They’ll have to be dumb,” Tooth opined, pulling her shoulders in, embarrassed by putting it like that.

Not that she was wrong.

“Very dumb,” agreed North.

Jackie planted his feet, clutched his staff and drew himself tall. This was the moment that he had been working up to. Whatever came out of his mouth next would be the plan of action.

What came out of his mouth was: “We should get a dog.”

There was a moment of silence disturbed only by soft tinkling of jingle bells, as some of the elves hidden under and behind furniture started quaking in their poulaines.

Aster gulped. “I don’t do well with dogs, Jackie-”

“I meant we as the Guardians. North’ll keep it.”

The tinkling intensified.

“It will be big, and angry, and fierce, and all kids will be terrified of it-”

It wasn’t even tinkling anymore; it was just plain _din_.

“-but it will never whisper in their ears about envy and bigotry and greed. It will never try and teach them hatred.”

“Does it have to be _a dog_?” Racking dish lickers.

Aster’s eyes skipped wildly over the room, this way and that, as his lagomorph instincts sought an escape route, but when Jackie landed in front of him and put his hands on Aster’s elbows, Aster managed to focus. He looked down at his cheese and kisses.

“It’s got to be a familiar fear to all the children in all the world,” cajoled Jackie. “And a dog is a lot less insidious than the darkness itself.”

“I think, Man in the Moon has to choose Guardian?” North pointed out. “We cannot just make?”

“Says who?” protested Jackie, turning away from Aster to argue with the rest of the Guardians. “Look, I know I’m the new guy-”

“Oh, Jack, don’t say that!” exclaimed Tooth. “Just because you haven’t been here with us for centuries doesn’t mean we won’t listen to you!”

Sandy formed a pictogram of a baby and then one of a lightbulb again, which Aster interpreted as the young ones being bright, or having bright ideas, or something along that track. Maybe the baby being the brightest lightbulb in the box (because Sandy could be witty like that Lewis Carrol guy when the mood struck him – and far more psychedelic).

And Jackie was – creative.

Aster had, paw to Mother Nature, _never_ experienced a situation wherein listening to Jackie didn’t turn out to be worthwhile in the end. And not just because it kept peace at home. Jackie was a breath of fresh air to the Guardians – he still kept a finger on the pulse of the human society, which even North had already disconnected from.

Aster took that as inspiration, and was learning to reconnect, but (Internet aside) he wasn’t quite there yet.

And he hated dogs – mostly because dogs instinctively considered him a prey to chase, and then he had to bop them on the nose with a boomerang, which nobody enjoyed – but if Jackie said they had to get a dog, then he was going to go out and get kibble and a bowl with the beast’s name. _Fido_? _Pluto_? He was partial to Pluto, despite the ‘is it or is it not a planet’ debate.

He had been close enough to Pluto to etch his name into the surface with his ship’s laser canons, were he that kind of a space bogan (which he wasn’t – no, really). It was a perfectly satisfactory… piece of rock.

“Aside from Guardianship as such,” asked Jackie, “is it the Man in the Moon that decides which spirit embodies an aspect?”

Aster nodded, before it occurred to him that he couldn’t actually be assured of any such thing. He had met Lunanoff, but they didn’t hold any deep conversations about metaphysics.

“Manny makes suggestions,” North amended helpfully.

“I think,” suggested Tooth, “maybe it’s about who’s got the potential? Take Jack – we all remember Jack – so, Jack was fun or joy or however you put it, _before_ the Moon called him.”

Sandy turned a heap of his sand into sandy snowflakes, and let them descend around him like a golden snowfall. He prolly never heard the warning about yellow snow.

And none of them – save possibly Tooth, who looked like she was biting her lip again – remembered that Lunanoff was the one who raised Jackie in the first place. So if aspect was, in fact, assigned, he could have done it then.

Jackie and Sophie had a theory that Lunanoff raised a spirit to fit the aspect, rather than assigned an aspect to an already existing spirit. It made Aster’s head spin. And how on Earth did _hope_ get stuck with _him_, then?

Aster remembered ‘68, remembered seeing Jackie as an obnoxious trouble-maker that got in the way of Easter. He, himself, had been a crotchety old man yelling at the young’un to _get off his lawn_. Some Guardian of Hope he was.

Jackie crossed his arms, hugging his staff to his chest. “How ‘bout we switch the roles this time? _We_ make the suggestion, and he confirms it by assigning the spirit to the aspect.”

Aster wasn’t entirely sure if Lunanoff _could_ do that.

“He’ll still have to be a Guardian,” Tooth pointed out nervously. “Are we sure that… whoever we pick will be… will have the right motivation?”

Good question. Aster already expected the attempts on chasing him around the place. Around all the places, probably. He might go and _live_ in his tunnels, if Jackie invited the thing to the Warren.

Jackie shook his head. “Never met a good dog that wouldn’t protect children. I think most bad dogs would, too.” That just left the really terrible ones.

Aster felt a slight tremble in his knees.

“Spirit dogs? Not many,” North pointed out, carding his fingers through his beard as he tried to use the grey matter between his ears. “Kerberus, I know. Nasty dog. Vicious.”

Tooth hummed appreciatively, prolly thinking about having _three_ full sets of teeth to admire. “As he should be, guarding Hades. But, no, not Guardian material.”

Sandy formed a dog, a star, and then a skull and crossbones.

“Not Grimm, either,” agreed Jackie. “He’s the bearer of bad news, not a protector.”

“Knitbone Pepper?” asked Aster, following the association from Zero, who was far too firmly attached to Skellington, and also not frightening at all. He failed to frighten even Aster, and Aster was predisposed for it.

“Who?” asked Jackie, North and Tooth in a unison, seconded by Sandy’s sandy question mark hanging in the air.

Aster looked away. “Never mind.” Besides, just like Zero, Knitbone wouldn’t leave his two-legged family for all the juicy bones in the world, so that was a moot point. Aster just had to resign himself to the challenge that was placing googies for the children in the Starcross Hall haunted by the ghost of their Mum’s dog. Not as easy as it sounded – but Aster was quick on his feet.

“Soph had a suggestion,” shared Jackie, pacing a couple of inches in the air. “I think it’s a good one. Worth trying at least.”

“Yes?” said North.

“Soph as in _Sophie_?” asked Tooth, narrowing her eyes in concentration. “Sophie _Bennet_? You know, Jamie’s little sister?” He face fell. “Oh, dear. I know Abby’s passed on, but I don’t think she’s hung around-”

“She wasn’t talking about Abby,” Jackie cut in. “But we don’t have a large window – we’ve got to get moving now, or we miss our chance. Cupcake knows about one-”

“One what?”

A puppy wagging its tail formed above Sandy’s head.

“A spirit dog?” asked Tooth.

Jackie’s expression closed off. “She’s not a spirit _yet_.”

There was a moment while they tried to stave off comprehension, and then the whole group drooped.

“Oh. Oh. Oh no,” moaned Tooth.

“But… shelters… or, Yeti will take care of-”

“Guys,” Jackie shut them up before they started planning an abduction and attempted to become the owners of a _mortal_ pet – that idea had ‘disaster’ written all over it. “Calm down. Think… dunno. _Circle of Life_? Or talk to Cupcake. She’s a veterinary technician – she knows how these things go.”

Even Aster, who didn’t _like_ dogs at all, felt uncomfortable. But, rack it, he wasn’t going to let Jackie go alone.

He stomped on the floor and offered his paw.

“Bun-Bun, you don’t have to-”

“I’m coming, unless ye tell me ye don’t want me there.” Aster wasn’t leaving Jackie to face it alone.

There was no way either North or Tooth should be allowed anywhere near the place. If they came, a dognapping _would_ happen. Followed by shenanigans. And, in the end, the disaster Aster had predicted.

And Sandy… well, he had depths. Aster didn’t want to have to start a fight with him if it turned out that _the Sandman_ was opposed to _putting dogs to sleep_. Which he might be, just for the irony of it.

“I want you there.” Jackie looked at the other Guardians, returning the pained, forced smiles, and patted Baby Tooth, who was softly meeping. Then he clasped Aster’s wrist. “Just… this won’t be nice.”

It wouldn’t be _fun_. It sure wouldn’t be _hopeful_.

Aster pulled his love closer and nudged him to move behind himself. He swallowed the ‘no worries’ and the ‘she’ll be apples’, and said: “When is it ever?”

He waited until Jackie climbed on (knees tight around Aster’s ribs, one arm around Aster’s neck, the other holding onto the staff), and then he jumped.

x

“If North flops on us, I’ll figure something out,” Jackie promised quietly.

Aster very much did not want a dog – any kind of dog – in the Warren, but he was far more open to discussion than he liked to admit. He was spared from stammering some kind of reassurance by Jackie setting off down a drab small-town street toward a particular house. The building barely differed from the ones surrounding it.

“This place?” Aster asked as they passed (unnoticed) a woman angrily smoking on the front steps.

“A vet’s clinic,” Jackie explained, stepping inside the house.

While the outside looked like an ordinary home, the inside had been converted into a poky animal hospital. There was a waiting room – now empty – and the pervading smells of disinfection and urine.

“Ye think we’ll find… here?” Aster was this close to pulling on his ears in frustration. There was a little bit of a desperate, childish hope present in the atmosphere, but even he could tell that there would be no miraculous happy ending coming out of the left field.

“There are good chances.” Jackie leant against the wall next to the door which led to the doctor’s office. He tilted his head back and glumly stared at the white ceiling. “Soph directed me to this place.”

Aster stared at the artificial plant in the corner for a moment. “Why?”

Jackie sighed and turned old, hurt eyes to Aster. “D’you know what they do to dogs that kill people?”

“…got a suspicion.”

“Depends on where it happens and what the circumstances are… but.” Jackie’s fingers clenched around his staff. “They say that those dogs have a taste for human flesh now, or whatever, and they can’t be allowed to live.” He took a deep breath. “So when a child and a dog are attacked-”

“I see,” Aster cut him off, just as the smoker from outside came in and strode straight into the doctor’s office.

Jackie and Aster took the chance to walk in while the door was open.

Aster _did_ see. The story neatly paralleled Jackie’s death and transformation. Of course Jackie would latch onto it.

Besides, Aster had to admit that a precedent like that raised the chance that this odd dog gambit would be successful.

“This him?” Aster asked lamely. There were two crying tinlids, a teenager that tried hard to look stoic for her younger siblings, a man that hadn’t showered or shaved in days, and the smoker, all gathered around a stainless-steel table with a limp dog lying on it. The doctor and an assistant were quietly talking in the adjacent room.

“_Her_,” corrected Jackie. “She ripped out the throat of a very bad man four days ago. Soph heard about it form Cupcake, they both got spitting mad, she ranted at me – and then it all clicked.”

“This is not…” Aster didn’t like dogs, but this wasn’t _right_.

Jackie leaned over one of the weeping tinlids and carded his fingers through the dog’s fur, scratched behind her ear. His expression turned grim. “It’s all a matter of checks and balances. She’s as traumatized as anyone, and they can’t talk to her about it. They don’t know how she’ll react. They’re _scared_.”

And that is what we’re looking for, Aster filled in.

x

After an argument that went vicious with everybody’s raw feelings, the unwashed man took the two smaller children home. And by _took_ Aster meant grabbed one under each arm and hauled them away as they screamed and wept.

The dog, even drugged to near-unconsciousness, tried to get to them.

The teenager planted herself on the spot and refused to move; her Father would have needed at least one more arm to get her out of the building, so she was allowed to stay.

Aster glimpsed a new person in the waiting room and slipped through the swinging door.

Sophie stood next to the artificial plant, arms crossed in front of her chest. Her black and purple hair was pulled back into a messy bun. There was no make-up on her face today. She wore an ankle-length black skirt and still didn’t button up her coat, even though the departing people outside exhaled visible puffs of vapour.

“I’m not late, then?” she asked, cold like the day.

Aster felt his fur rise. “No. They’re just about to…” He grimaced.

Jackie turned up by his side, smoothing Aster’s fur back down with a firm, reassuring stroke along his shoulders. “Soph, you know that we can-”

“I came here for this,” she cut him off, baring her teeth. “I mean, not the part when they put her to sleep… She’s a good dog. She deserves a chance. And… okay, this is childish, but… I love my stupid big brother, and I think it’s great that he’s got his supernatural friends-”

“We’re friends, Soph, you and I,” Jackie assured her.

Aster wanted to say something along the same lines, but he felt like he hadn’t earned it back. Yet.

“Anyway,” Sophie continued, “I get sick of him talking about how he once helped save the world. I want to… I want to do something significant, too.”

Jackie snorted. “Like that time you got your asshole Principal fired and arrested wasn’t significant. Or founding the GSA at your school. Or, oh, hey – who was it that helped the police crack-”

“Stop it!” cried Sophie, red like a tomato.

“-that drug-dealing case-”

“Shut up, Frosty! That was just a coincidence-”

“You went snooping, like a super sleuth-”

“I watched too much Veronica Mars-”

“You knocked out a bunch of super-powered spirits when you were _three_-”

“That says more about them than about me-”

“_Oi_!” protested Aster, but no one really paid any attention to him at that moment. And, much as he hated to admit it, that one kind of might have been deserved.

“And you’re about to gather that awesomeness, and ask out the girl you like-”

“Frosty!”

“-finally-”

“Shut up!”

“-because I swear to you, she likes you, and _she’s_ not going to fail the Jack-Frost spot-check because _she was there_-”

“I swear to all the summer spirits in all the religions, Jack Frost, shut up right now _before she hears you_-”

Aster barely heard the quiet whine that came from the doctor’s office. His ears pricked up.

The stuttering hope winked out.

Aster swore.

The mock-argument fell silent. Jackie flashed inside the office so fast the doctor must have thought it was just a breeze. Sophie, no longer distracted by him, suddenly remembered why she was here; she hunched and clenched her fists until her knuckles went bone white.

Aster shuffled from foot to foot. “We should-”

“Talk,” Sophie cut him off. “We should talk. I’ve wanted to, for a while. I’m not wasting this chance. So, while Jack’s… busy…”

Her eyes met Aster’s square on.

He felt the fur Jackie had soothed down rise again.

“I know you never told me what happened, because I was too young, and you wanted to spare me… fair enough. But I’m not too young anymore. And I’ve heard two very different stories about how Jack Frost joined the Guardians. My idiot brother repeated his so often we were all sick of it. I’ve heard Jack’s side.” She bit her lip. Her nostrils flared.

Aster took a reflexive step backwards.

“And I don’t think either of those versions was how it really happened. Jack made it sound like it was all lighthearted fun, but you know what I read between the lines? That you kidnapped him by force and coerced him into fighting your enemy. Someone he had no reason to fight.”

That was – not inaccurate. Pitch had even given Jackie the out. He had been lying, of course – he’d have come right back for Jackie after he was done with the official Guardians, no way would he have left even a potential one at his back – but that wasn’t the point.

“I had a reason to be hacked off at him, and then to have that shoved in my face by the Moon making him one of us – I goaded North into that introduction. That’s _my_ part in it. And we damn near paid for it by Jackie walking away…”

“He tried. You stopped him-”

“No.” Aster dragged a paw over his face. He didn’t like to remember that time, and it was getting a bit difficult not to blow his top at the runt for poking at it. But at least they were both distracted – better if they sniped at one another a bit than listening to what was happening behind the door. “We let him go. He _did_ walk away, Sophie.” Aster scratched at an ear. “Then he came back. He doesn’t talk about what happened to him-”

“Was that the point when you thought he betrayed you all?”

Strewth, she didn’t hold back, did she. Aster didn’t flinch, but it was a close shave.

Aster had thought his entire existence was over, and he had taken it out on _everybody_ around. North and Tooth had gotten similar reactions moments before Jackie arrived. The difference was that North and Tooth knew him, and knew that they had to just racking ignore him when he went troppo like that.

Jackie had had no idea.

Aster could explain all this to Sophie; he had a feeling she might understand, even if she’d still probably yell at him for being a ratbag. It’d be deserved. But he wasn’t going to. Maybe Sophie was that kind of friend to Jackie, but she sure wasn’t that close to Aster.

Not anymore. Not _yet_.

“Ye think Jackie missed any of this? Ye think, when Jackie finally gave me the time of day after _years_ of knowing me, that he didn’t know me at all? If ye do, then he deserves a better friend.”

Sophie didn’t flinch either. She held Aster’s gaze with confidence, and it was like looking in a mirror. Near the same green, too. No wonder Aster had adored her when she was tiny – how could he have forgotten?

And now she was full-grown, and he had missed it – he had missed it all. Not to mention that she thought he was scum.

She huffed, closed her eyes for a moment, and nodded. “Fair point.”

Aster didn’t trust it. “Ye were pretty hacked off, before.”

“Still am,” she assured him, green eyes snapping to his face again. Her face twisted up into an ugly grimace. “The way you treated Jack is… _abominable_, and you don’t deserve his forgiveness.”

“Mate, that’s between me and Jackie.” It was private, and Aster was a bit annoyed that Jackie had gone and shot his mouth off about it to somebody else.

The only reason why he didn’t blow up straightaway was that he knew this feeling – had been here before. More than once. And he had had to eat his words every single damn time. See? Even old geezers could learn new tricks sometimes.

The trick went like this: Jackie did something that made Aster mad, so Aster gritted his teeth instead of letting loose, and _asked for an explanation_. Nine times out of ten they had their wires crossed, and the tenth time was usually Jackie getting hurt and trying to hide it because he thought it was his own fault and people (_Aster_) would get mad at him for it. Which Aster did.

It always made him mad when Jackie got hurt.

“Suuure,” Sophie drawled out. “I just don’t like people abusing power imbalances like that.”

“What are ye on ‘bout?” Aster and Jackie had gone toe to toe in the skirmish in ’68; without trying to seriously harm each other they seemed about matched. And Jackie had gotten a couple decent power-ups since then.

If Aster did something Jackie didn’t like, Jackie could turn him into a shower of pink ice shards just like that.

Sophie narrowed those green peepers at him, and it felt like being judged a failure by Mother Nature herself. “How much shit will he let you get away with to keep you close? He’s terrified of being alone and invisible-”

Of course Jackie was. Who wasn’t? And Jackie had lived like that for a long time.

“-_again_, and he bought your trust by tying his existence to yours, to the Guardians. He didn’t need to. He was strong _and_ independent before. He gave up his freedom to buy your companionship.” She stood on her toes to get as far into Aster’s face as she could. “How is that not power imbalance?”

Aster scowled. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Wasn’t it?” With a huff, she fell back onto her heels. “Does Jack ever admit it to you when he’s facing problems? I mean serious problems?”

Aster’s nose twitched. He wasn’t the best at listening. That was established. But he did his damnedest-

When someone smacked him over the head with a clue.

Sophie sneered. “Right-”

“No!” Aster pulled himself upright and glared down at her. “No. Jackie and I talk.”

“And you trust him?”

“More than myself, most days.”

“Huh.”

There was a moment of silence and then Jackie’s voice, dryly asking: “Is it safe to come out yet?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

The dog hesitantly followed him, looking back a couple of times.

Someone was crying. The dog whined softly and looked up at Jackie, begging.

Jackie whispered: “Help us keep them safe?” while stroking her back. He should have had to lean down, Aster felt, but apparently that was no longer necessary; the dog had grown to almost twice its original size and came up to Jackie’s elbow now. Huge, hulking beast.

Aster shivered.

“Hey there, Stella,” said Sophie, sinking to one knee so she could hug the monster around the neck.

_Stella_ rested her head on Sophie’s shoulder and bared her teeth at Aster.

Aster flinched away from her. He wasn’t proud of the reaction, but. Dog. Bunny. _Instincts_.

Sophie laughed. She sounded a bit like a hyena, and she set off Jackie sniggering, so Aster huffed and hunched and crossed his arms in front of his chest – which, of course, just made them laugh harder.

And the dog was laughing with them. Vicious thing. Aster would have to be very careful.

“We should go,” Aster suggested.

He flinched again when the suggestion resulted in the abrupt death of the laughter.

“Yeah, we should,” Jackie agreed. “Soph-”

“I’m not here for any of you, anyway.”

“Sure didn’t mind taking advantage of an opportunity,” muttered Aster, who still keenly felt the raking over the coals she gave him.

“See you ‘round, Bunny,” she replied unrepentantly and stood up facing the office door.

“See ye.”

“Thanksgiving, Soph,” Jackie reminded her, darting in for a hug. “I want all the dirty details-”

“Piss off!”

Jackie hopped down the front stairs and into the street, followed closely by _Stella_. Aster lingered just long enough for the vet’s assistant to come out into the waiting room and fall straight into Sophie’s arms.

Sophie held her, tight and close, for so long that Aster couldn’t justify standing there anymore. He stepped through the front door, onto the porch, watched Jackie and Stella dancing around, and listened.

“C’mon, Cupcake,” Sophie cajoled. “Drinks are on me-”

Cupcake snorted. “You’re too young to buy booze-”

“Like I’m going to let that stop me?”

“It’s still morning-”

“It’s _Saturday_.”

“College kids…” Cupcake grumbled, and laughed wetly.

“Don’t even,” protested Sophie. “I _know_ what you and the rest of my brother’s gang got up to in college-”

“Stop eavesdropping and get a move on, Bun-Bun!” Jackie called out.

Aster got a move on.

x

“Everyone, come meet Stella,” Jackie announced to the hall at large. “Our new addition.”

Stella reacted to Tooth and her army of little buzzers swarming her by bracing her hind legs and roaring so hard that a heap of snow fell off the edge of North’s roof.

Aster found himself crouching behind Jackie, who was half worried and half trying not to laugh.

The tooth fairies scattered to all upper corners of the hall, which they judged safe enough.

Tooth herself merely blinked, and then pursed her mouth. “Oh dear, oh dear, someone was sneaking desserts off the table? Not as clean as we’d like – and we _must_ do something about that halitosis…”

Stella, bemused by Tooth’s reaction, sat on her haunches and quizzically looked at Jackie.

Jackie shrugged at her. “That’s Tooth. She’s always like that. Best just to go along with-”

“Welcome to North Pole!” boomed North.

Stella hesitated. Then her tail thumped against the carpet. And thumped again.

Figured that North and a hulking beast would get along at the first wall-shaking exclamation.

There was a fanfare. Of course there was. It was _North_.

Once quiet fell again, the dog poked her head out from underneath the sofa.

North knelt down in front of her. “Not scared, are you? Is just elves making music!”

Stella growled.

He spread his arms. “Come, come! We have nice welcome for new friend!”

Stella rushed out, and managed to knock North over. He thudded onto the carpet, but seemed happy enough to tousle with the dog for a bit, grappling and dodging not-really-playful snaps of teeth. In the end he pinned her down, gently for someone of his bulk, but with strength she couldn’t buck.

“Boy, wish that method of making friends had occurred to me when I met Cottontail,” muttered Jackie. He bit down on his lower lip and glanced at Aster through his fringe.

Aster shifted; his and Jackie’s acquaintance would have progressed _very_ differently if they had started out with a bout of _wrestling_.

Tooth giggled so hard a handful of her fairies had to hold her upright.

Stella, once again on her feet, stuck to North like he had hung the racking Moon.

“Are you from Baskerville?” North asked, not bothered a bit that he was having a conversation with a canine.

Which, it occurred to Aster, might have been Aster’s removed fault. North had been friends with Aster for centuries, and after that a dog’s mug probably didn’t make that much difference to a mostly hairless ape.

“Stella’s from Forkston,” Jackie explained. “And she used to be a German Shepperd… but we all used to be something once, right?”

Stella, Aster maintained, now looked like she was part-bear. She was still changing, from minute to minute, trying to find a shape that would fit her before she settled. In any case, she seemed to prefer gargantuan, hairy, toothy, slobbering and bad-tempered.

Except, apparently, when it came to North.

She rose on her hind legs, braced her front paws on North’s shoulders, and gave his face a wet, disgusting lick.

Aster shuddered. Jackie clasped his paw. And choked on suppressed laughter.

“We must celebrate!” North announced predictably.

The yeti brought in nosh. Mead and cider – and a bottle of vodka for North, who needed astounding amounts of booze to feel its effect at all – followed by mountainous cookie trays (“Nick, no-!” Tooth protested pointlessly). At the end of the procession came Phil, carrying a stainless-steel bowl with an enormous raw steak-

Stella, who had been predatorily watching one of the elves with trumpets, appeared in front of Phil in a literal flash.

It was obviously a friendship at the first sniff – Phil got a more intense laving than even North, although he seemed to appreciate it far less. There were globs of slobber left all over his fur in the aftermath, and a lot of cursing in yetish, which had Tooth in stitches (as well as the other yeti and, of course, Jackie).

While the dish licker munched on her steak, Aster grabbed a glass of cider and a plate of snickerdoodles, and settled in his favourite chair. He remained on guard, but so far Stella hadn’t given him a reason to run for cover. He’d stay cautious, but maybe he’d give the paranoia a break. Show off that he’d learnt something from the mess that was Jackie’s introduction to the gang.

Stella, in the meantime, did a walkabout of the hall, sniffing at corners. Aster expected her to _mark_ things, but apparently she was more of a lady than that. He wondered how smart she really was.

Not being able to speak wasn’t an indication of anything.

Case in point: Sandy descended to just above the floor level, let himself be sniffed – and then sneezed at – and was in turn allowed to pet the ravenous beast.

Aster had forgotten about Sandy _again_. Every time it happened he promised himself that _this_ was the _last_ time, and every time he failed to keep that promise. But Sandy was just so… quiet.

“Manny!” North exclaimed, turning to the window, where the Full Moon hung in spite of daytime and season.

“It’s time, I guess?” said Jackie, leaning on his staff. He _looked_ nonchalant, but Aster knew him well enough to see the thinly disguised apprehension.

“This is exciting!” chattered Tooth. “We’ve never done anything like this!”

Sandy finished introducing himself and escorted Stella to the platform.

With regret, Aster abandoned the chair, the drink and the cookies, and joined the half-circle of his friends. He felt like there was an army of ants marching under his skin. He wasn’t all gaga about this solution, but he admitted it was a good one. If Lunanoff left them to hang, they’d have to come up with something else and…

Aster really, truly did not want to ever see Pitch again. Ever. Even if it meant the chance to pound his face into so much gore paste, it wouldn’t be worth it.

The hall darkened.

A single beam of moonlight hit the platform.

Everyone – the Guardians, the yeti, even the elves – held their breath.

There she was. Formed out of light, but unmistakably herself – Stella, the Guardian of Instinctive Fear.

Stella growled at the hologram.

The hologram cowered away from her, and then dispersed.

Daylight returned.

“Yes!” Jackie and Tooth jumped and hugged in midair.

North clapped happily, and was about to direct the elves in another fanfare, but Sandy distracted him.

Aster and Stella shared a long, contemplative look. And came to a tacit agreement.

x

Sophie stood on the dormitory building’s smoking terrace, wrapped in a comforter. Only her face and one hand with a ciggie in it poked out. She spotted Aster right away.

“Hey, Bunny.”

Aster swallowed the ‘those things will kill you’ that was on the tip of his tongue. He sucked at apologies, but once it finally got through his thick head that he messed up, he grovelled to the best of his ability. Which meant not getting into his friend’s face in the very first sentence he spoke.

“Hey, Sophie,” he said instead.

She snorted. “You realize you’re just confirming my hypothesis, that if I helped the Guardians save the world, they would start paying attention to me.”

“…that’s not what…” He rubbed the back of his ear. How did he keep mucking up?

Sophie laughed at him. “Damn it, Frosty’s right.”

“Um.” Well, obviously they talked about Aster. That much had been clear from the whole protectively threatening routine he got during their last meeting.

“I thought someone like you – you’d have it all figured out. But you’re just as lost as the rest of us.” She binned the fag and led the way inside the dormitory building.

Aster followed, doing his best – still poor – impression of meekness. He didn’t have a meek bone in his body.

At least it made her laugh.

“Haven’t dated anyone since… millennia ago. A long damn time.” And he wasn’t a charmer even before. Once in a while someone took pity on him, he remembered that – but names, faces, memories they made together, all that was lost. He couldn’t recall anything beyond a silly detail here or there. And he thought – he thought he couldn’t do this anymore.

Finding out he could – and _wanted to_ – was a right proper shock. But damn if Jackie wasn’t worth all that and more.

“It’s complicated,” he concluded, ducking through the door into her room.

Sophie snorted, chucking the comforter on top of her bed and kicking the door shut. She was wearing mis-matched pyjamas – a blue top with a starfish pattern, and striped green pants. “Very _Facebook_ of you, Easter Bunny.”

Aster scrunched up his nose. “Not like _that_.” He rubbed at the base of his ear while he tried to find the right words to describe what it _was_ like. Sophie should be able to get it – she was a right smart sheila, and it wasn’t like humans dating didn’t come with its own set of difficulties (judging by her failed date not so long ago, and how Jackie alluded to whom she really liked, she definitely should get it). “Guardianship is… it’s serious business. I pushed Jackie to think more about consequences – but that kind of thinking gets in the way of _fun_.”

Guardianship was – had to be, but also just plain _was_, as in _intrinsically_ – the most important thing in their existence. It had to come first, always. It had to be given consideration whenever either Aster or Jackie were making a major decision.

And a pledge like theirs was about as major as it got, because Aster had fallen for Jackie like a meteorite.

“Right. No one would ever get smashed if they couldn’t temporarily forget about hangovers.” Sophie ‘inconspicuously’ kicked an empty bottle under her bed, and flopped down onto the mattress.

The springs squealed.

Aster grimaced.

“Aye. It’s a lot like that.” Aster was immune to the toxic effects of alcohol, but he had seen what the stuff could do to people (at least drunk North was hilarious, but a lot of others turned into their worst selves). “Jackie’s a great Guardian. Possibly the strongest of us all. And we need him.” Now, how to put this so he didn’t sound like a right dag. “But we also need him to take it seriously.”

It didn’t mean that Jackie goofed or slacked off, no, just… he had a lightness to him. Found a reason to laugh in every situation – sometimes through tears, sometimes mockingly or with anger… sometimes at himself, at his own pain.

Aster squared his shoulders. “And… I don’t like him being serious. Feels wrong.”

Sophie nodded knowingly. “Impossible choice?”

Was it? Aster wasn’t sure there even was a _choice_ there. Just a right tricky balancing act. He reached for a metaphor that sucked all the magic out of it, but mostly worked. “We talk it up, banging on about it being our calling… but when ye go down to brass tacks, Guarding Childhood is a job. It feeds us and keeps the roofs over our heads, and if it fulfills us, that’s great. If it doesn’t… we take pride in doing it to the best of our abilities, and enjoy our downtime.” It was just like being a soldier, only there was far less killing and dying involved. “Not that fighting can’t be fun, too.” He grinned. “There’s spirits I’m more than happy to kick in the face, and I know Jackie feels the same.”

Jackie actually felt that _more_. Aster had been trained to be a soldier and knew how to _use_ violence; Jackie incorporated fun, even the part of it that _was_ violence.

So, fair dinkum, part of Jackie incorporated violence.

It was racking magnificent. Aster went twitter-pated whenever he got the chance to see it in action.

“I’ve got a green belt in karate,” Sophie said with a conspiratorial grin. “I get it.”

Aster found that he was not surprised by this at all. He just regretted that he had missed it when one of his favourite kids got into martial arts. It had been yonks since he had the chance to mentor a new fighter.

“Good on ye.”

“You know, I thought that _the Easter Bunny_ wouldn’t endorse violence on principle.”

Aster gave her a skeptical look. “Ye know we met when-”

“Yeah, yeah-” Sophie flapped her hand. “-big battle when my brother saved you with the power of blind faith that wouldn’t be swayed by facts-”

“_Oi_!”

“-and then got named _The Guardian of the Guardians_ and thus his name went down in history-”

“That’s stretching it a bit.”

“I had to live with him, _mate_.” She scrunched up her nose in disgust (just like Aster would).

Right. Not like the Guardians had missed that Jamie was a bit of a braggart, but he was a good kid. Just maybe the kind of brother a younger sibling wanted to stuff in the cupboard and lock the door some days. “Sorry.”

“I’m not,” Sophie assured him. “Look, I was a bit of a bitch to you-”

“_A bit_.”

She stuck out her tongue. “I just – I felt horrible about the whole… _thing_, and took it out on you. You know what that’s like.”

El-Ahrairah’s wiggly ears, did he. “Aye.”

They nodded at each other. And then, after a bit of a pause, both nodded again. They had their familial awkwardness back just like that. _Almost_ no drama.

“So,” Sophie said. “Sorry, I guess.”

“Ye did have a bit of a point,” Aster acknowledged. He _could_ be a first-class hoon.

“_A bit_,” she retorted. “I learnt from the best about how to strike where it hurts. The truth is a lot sharper weapon than a lie, isn’t it, Bunny?”

Aster… Aster taught her that, hadn’t he? It had been years since they spent time together, but he used to linger for Sophie the same way the rest of the gang lingered for Jamie and his friends. And Jackie… apparently already then Jackie cared. He showed interest in what interested Aster. He saw what was important to Aster, and the same things became important to him.

“But,” Sophie continued, “the stuff I told you, they’re not real concerns anymore. They were once – years ago. I think I was the first one Jack talked to about you. When he still wasn’t sure. There were… plenty of reasons why it wasn’t a good idea, you and him. I was worried.” She chuckled. “He’s returning that concern now, with interest. I can’t get a date without giving him a detailed report-”

“So ye and…”

“Nuh-uh.” She raised a hand.

Aster belted up. He could get the good oil later, either from her or from Jackie. Not like he didn’t have a fair idea, anyway.

“That’s not the point. The point is…” She pulled her hair back and turned her head to show off a tiny tattoo behind her ear.

An aster.

Aster’s breath caught.

“Just because you forgot me doesn’t mean I stopped believing in you,” Sophie explained.

Aster’s sight blurred. He blinked. And wiped his face, pretending there weren’t wet patches of fur there. “I… I sure don’t deserve it, but-”

“I’m going to give you another chance,” Sophie cut him off. “You fucked up, and I’m not forgiving you, but I’m giving you the chance to earn my forgiveness. That’s what friends do, Bunny. You taught that to Jack. He taught it to me. We’re all better for it.”

Aster grabbed her and pulled her close to his chest, softer than he would pull Jackie, but still tight, terrified that she would disappear on him. Who knew how long he would get to keep this? How many years had he wasted already?

“That reminds me,” Sophie said into his ruff, “you’re coming to Thanksgiving this year.”

“…er.”

Sophie snorted and pulled herself out of his arms. “That wasn’t a question, Bunny. Frosty’ll be there, and if you make him come stag _again_, I’ll let Pippa’s sprog catch me planting Easter eggs next year.”

Aster scowled. “Ye wouldn’t!”

“Just try me!”

He knew when he was defeated. He shouldn’t have taught her to negotiate. Besides, it wasn’t even that he didn’t want to come visit – he just wasn’t sure how it worked, with adults in the house… well, _adult_ adults, not adults like _Jamie_. Who was basically a kid, just taller. Or Sophie, who was already disconcertingly adult before she hit middle school, only shorter.

Still, if Jackie really had visited before, as Sophie implied he did (Aster would have to double-check, because _he_ had taught Sophie how to get around telling the truth without lying), they must have figured out a way.

And, though Aster wouldn’t admit it under pain of listening to North dumping on Easter again, he was ready do to just about anything Sophie asked for. Looked like no matter how much changed, some things stayed the same.

x

Aster watched the fairies buzz around every which way, and tried not to get a headache from the way Tooth broke her own sentences with dental reports. Then she got distracted, and he got distracted, and all of sudden he was broken out of his thoughts by her: “I never thanked you, did I?”

_What_?

“What are ye on ‘bout, Tooth?” Aster wasn’t aware of having done anything worth gratitude in a long while.

Maybe for Jackie, but Jackie was Jackie, and then it didn’t count, because it was all too self-serving. As earthly pleasures went, making Jackie happy was quite up there with discovering new colours, painting an original and unique egg, finding a chocky recipe that stopped a connoisseur in their tracks, or seeing children’s faces light up. Aster had begun to remember the great and terrible things he was capable off, darkness he had forgotten for centuries, solely on the notion of what would he be willing to do for his love. Dangerous stuff, emotion like that.

“You and Jack… when you gave this – gave each other – a chance… you brought so much happiness to this place. Happiness and hope.”

That was basically what they _were_. Was Tooth thanking him for _existing_?

He was about to say something sarcastic and dismissive, but the sincere look on her face stopped him. And he had to admit that they – the Guardians – were different now. Better. More… _awake_.

“Jackie woke something up in all of us.”

Tooth’s wings fluttered. “That’s a good metaphor. Yes, we were sleep-walking, going through the motions. It feels more like living now. Thank you for that, Aster.”

Aster scowled and looked away. That was just uncalled for. “Thank _Jackie_. I’m just one of ye hoons that needed a proper kick in the tail.”

Tooth opened her mouth to protest, but suddenly got sidetracked by something happening on top of the next tower.

Aster expected to see North franticly trying to keep upright some sort of structure he had inadvertently damaged, but there was just Jackie, walking backwards and gesticulating wildly as he tried to convince the fairies of something – most likely – inadvisable.

Aster suddenly realised that he was the only one who had the patience and the attention span to stay with Tooth at the table this long. All the other Guardians had snuck off.

There was only so much tea and sugar-free confection you could force down your throat before it made you sick, and there frankly wasn’t much to do at Punjam Hy Loo that didn’t have to do with teeth. Jackie had chatted with Baby Tooth for a bit, but then the fairy had to go about her job, and the rest of the swarm were being very clear about how close Jackie _wasn’t_ allowed to the teeth.

By the worried looks Tooth was casting that way, this wasn’t the first time boredom had driven Jackie to messing around this place.

Aster set down his half-empty cup. “I’d better-”

“No!” Tooth assured him. “It’s – it’s fine…”

Right. That sounded… _convincing_.

Aster climbed to his feet, took a couple steps to get clear from all the fiddly porcelain, and lobbed a boomerang straight at Jackie’s head.

Tooth’s gasp made him grin.

The flock of fairies around Jackie shot apart in all directions. Jackie reacted to their reaction by crouching and spinning; the boomerang flew over his head. There was a moment while Jackie evaluated the situation, then he shifted from fighting mood back into playful, and it was _on_.

It was sweltering at Tooth’s palace year-round, so Jackie was at a slight disadvantage – which did not really offset his advantage of flight in this sort of environment. Aster could jump from tower to tower, but Jackie could stop in midair, or change his direction, easy as breathing.

They usually did this somewhere more temperate and less civilised (less vertical, too) – above the Warren, mostly – where they didn’t have witnesses aside from a few local critters. Less architecture to damage, too.

“Holding back, Bun-Bun?” teased Jackie.

“Let’s not bring Tooth’s home down on top of our heads. Or she’ll come after us with _blades_.”

Jackie grimaced and turned upside down in midair to avoid getting brained.

His staff tripped Aster and made him miss a catch.

It was _fun_.

It was fun until Aster dodged the staff, kicked off and instead of retreating to open a space for a counterattack he had to dodge two rows of large, sharp teeth.

An instance later his entire vision was flooded with red.

“No, no, no! Not a fight, _Zvezdochka_! A dance!”

Ah. Apparently the red was the back of North’s coat. And North had placed himself in between Aster and Stella.

“See? No one is hurt!”

Stella barked in protest.

“Very skilled they are, our friends. Very well matched, _da_?”

Jackie’s eyes widened. There was no blush, of course, but he seemed embarrassed by getting called out by North like that.

Aster grinned. And kicked Jackie’s feet from under him.

Jackie floated two feet off the ground (the rotten cheat!). “North’s… he’s… he’s _indoctrinating_ Stella!”

Aster jumped, pulled Jackie back down by the hook of his staff – always a risk, since that thing could go cold enough to freeze North’s vodka solid – and bounced when Jackie kicked one of the boomerangs to redirect it at the back of Aster’s head.

“It’s _North_,” Aster pointed out, catching the boomerang and throwing it right back. “He indoctrinates _everyone_.” He had done the same thing to Jackie, after all.

Jackie crouched and rubbed his foot.

Aster smirked. Not a good idea to get in the way of the boomerangs. Jackie should have known better by now, but he couldn’t seem to unlearn that reflex. Whenever his staff wasn’t available, he started kicking.

It was a whole other kettle of fish when he was wearing skates, but he rarely went around with blades on his shoes unless there was a frozen lake involved.

Speaking of blades-

“You’ve been holding out on us!” Tooth called out and raised twin wooden practice swords in a clear challenge.

Aster’s and Jackie’s eyes met.

They were _screwed_.

x

Aster considered Sandy a trusted and valued friend. He _did_. He was truly as fond of the drongo as you could be of someone who thought nothing of invading your dreams and commenting on them later (though, to be fair to Sandy, he had at least waited until they were alone) and who when occasion called for it killed with prejudice anything that attacked your back.

“Potato sack of glorified space dust!” Aster grumped, stomping into the kitchen.

Since it was mid-November, he didn’t expect Jackie home any time soon, what with all the windows that needed frosting, and the nightly snowfalls up north. So he was brought up short when he found his favourite spirit sitting on the bench, elbows on the table, chin cupped in his palms, and staring into a bowl of salad Aster had made yesterday to use up a bunch of slightly wilted carrots.

Aster’s nose twitched. For a moment he was worried that things had gone wrong – that Stella wouldn’t be enough to bring back the self-preservation to children around the world – but there was none of the grimness of the past days. Jackie simply looked lost in thought.

Not an everyday sight, but also not so rare as to make Aster worry.

“Oi, mate. If ye keep thinking heavy thoughts, the Wind won’t be able to pick you up anymore.”

Jackie startled, and glanced over his shoulder. He smiled to see Aster.

He _smiled_ just to _see Aster_.

Then, because nothing as fragile as that smile could last long, he shrewdly narrowed his eyes. “You’ll have to carry me everywhere.”

“Racking nuisance.” Aster removed the leftover eggs from his bandolier and replaced them in the cold box. “Freeze my toes off-”

“_No worries_,” Jackie assured him, pleased as punch.

Aster froze mid-step. “Ye didn’t just-”

“Didn’t _what_?” Jackie grinned a challenge at him.

Stronger spirits than Aster couldn’t have rejected that invitation. Aster had Jackie off the bench and in his grip an instance later, and though the larrikin pretended to try and squirm away, he kept sabotaging himself with bursts of giggling.

Aster shook his head, mock-exasperated. “What am I gonna do with ye?”

Jackie turned his head as far as it would go. “Please not the briar patch?” he suggested, tongue in cheek and peering up through his eyelashes. “Bre’r Rabbit, Bre’r Rabbit-”

Aster nuzzled Jackie’s neck. “Not yer _brother_, sweetheart.”

Jackie spasmed with a burst of uncontrollable laughter and let himself fall backwards into Aster’s hold. Aster got a paw under that hoodie, and smirked in satisfaction when the laughter abruptly ended, and Jackie slumped, absolutely relaxed.

The mood shifted so fast Aster found himself waiting for a thunderclap. None came, of course, not in the Warren, not in their _home_, but his heart made enough racket to make up for it.

Jackie smelled like snow now; his _cold_ tickled Aster’s nose, climbed inside him and nested in his lungs. Aster tightened his arms around Jackie’s waist and hips, pulled him close, closer yet, as close as he could without giving in to the urge to _shift_.

Jackie, predictably, chuckled at his desperation. “Of all the things to adopt from real bunnies, Aster-” He trailed off into a whine when Aster stuck a paw down his pants.

Served him right for being such a pain in the neck.

So maybe Aster’s libido woke up with a vengeance, but Jackie was the one who roused it, so he could take the consequences. “Will the northern hemisphere have late winter this year?” Aster muttered, making Jackie squirm and whimper some more.

Surely Jackie taking one late afternoon off wouldn’t skew weather patterns too much?

Aster was a bit ashamed of even thinking it, but there _had been_ that one late _morning_ he had taken off right before Easter this year…

Jackie took advantage of Aster getting a little too lost in the memory, and managed to twist around in Aster’s arms. He didn’t make any effort to get away, though, so he must not have been too worried about that weather. “The whole of Pennsylvania’s going to wake up under three inches _tomorrow_.” He put his arm around Aster’s midriff and just held on for a moment. “Stella’s on the prowl.”

“Fear of cold?”

“Fear of cold, and dark, and loneliness and death,” Jackie whispered.

Aster nodded. All those were dangers worth fearing. He, himself, was terrified that Jackie would just not be here one day, for whatever reason. He couldn’t remember feeling that way before. It was unfamiliar. And disconcerting.

And, most likely, Stella’s fault.

He hated it, but if this was the price to pay for being careful, for learning new tricks, for _not driving Jackie away_, he’d take it. Both the spirit dog and the sudden attack of nerves.

“But ye…” Aster swallowed. “Ye’re not afraid, are ye? Not of…?” Not of _loneliness_, right? Aster did well enough to convince Jackie that the Warren was his home, _right_?

Jackie pulled far enough away from Aster’s chest that they could look at one another. There was a smirk on his face. “It’s like you don’t know me.”

“I do. I _do_ know ye… just not as well as I’d like to,” Aster admitted.

He closed his eyes and spent a few calm, blissful moments just holding his love close, safe, _happy_. There was so much he didn’t know about Jackie. So much. He learned new things about him every time he turned around.

But he was going to keep working on it, keep learning, for as long as Jackie was happy to give him the time of day.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: cross-species relationship; age difference; mentions of violence, war and genocide; off-screen animal death; mild angst; mentions of addiction; underage drinking; themes of abandonment; comic book psychology; movie-canon (few book influences in this story, sorry folks); bad language
> 
> References and characters were borrowed from (not limited to): Nightmare before Christmas; Knitbone Pepper, Ghost Dog; Watership Down; Podkin One-Ear; The Velveteen Rabbit; Iron Man; Animal Farm; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Gordy


End file.
